The Next Boom: Electronic Universities

April 14, 1985|By Douglas Pike of the Sentinel Staff (Douglas Pike is a member of the Sentinel's editorial board.)

President Reagan has done it again -- winning support for reasonable cuts in college loans and grants by waving a meat ax. So now liberals should stifle their hype that Reagan would keep poor geniuses from attending Yale. Instead, they should learn that technology can bring a quality education to far more people than can throwing more federal aid at traditional campuses.

Ivy-cloaked campuses are great, but they are an expensive way to deliver knowledge. The first couple of thousand dollars go just for room and board -- that is, for the fun of living away from home.

Walter Annenberg, former U.S. ambassador to Britain, has seen the future and it is videotapes and computer software. In 1981 Annenberg gave the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a cool $150 million for a 15-year effort to jolt higher education with telecommunications and new technology. It won't be long before millions of ''distant learners'' inexpensively and conveniently learn subjects in front of television sets and computers.

This windfall will raise the quality of courses on public TV. One recent grant is for a course to teach college-level French. The course's core will be a made-for-TV play using French actors. That beats some professor on the boob tube saying ''Comment allez-vous?''

So far, the Annenberg money has gone toward innovative teaching ideas, even though the best lecturers at the best colleges are shows by themselves. Simply taping and airing their lectures would be a public service and a great equalizer for the 99.99 percent of us who never will hear them live. But that's where technology threatens the status quo. Sharing these resources nationally would make some parents a tad less eager to fork over $15,000 so that little Johnny can be there in person and have some give-and-take with the best and the brightest.

It's the give-and-take, of course, that is missing on tape. But that is what is so exciting about another area that the Annenberg funds aim to improve: systems that use words and graphs on a computer screen. Such courses, which are very popular with kids now in high school, let students procede at their own speed. More important, some of the new ones offer two-way communication with teachers.

TeleLearning Systems is a pioneer in the field. The San Francisco company offers 105 courses -- from marketing to writing -- to about 9,000 students. Students can earn course credit and even a bachelor's degree or M.B.A. They get started by paying from $89 to $150 -- depending on their own computer -- for a modem to get access to the courses, which cost $125 to $225.

Sure, at a low-rent electronic university you miss football, proms and more. Much of what I gained as a liberal arts student came from interchanges outside of class. People mature between freshman and senior years, but a lot of it is coincidental. I probably would have learned more from two years of classes and two years of military service. Even a mix of study and low-budget travel would have cost a lot less than four years of college.

Folks who aren't wealthy will be big winners as technology makes learning more available to people where they already live. And as ''distant learning'' booms, it will shake up the mind-set that sees a four-year stint on a campus as the bedrock of higher education. Colleges sell the campus experience as the key to equal opportunities, but that's the old tunnel vision. Increasingly, the most important tools will be technology and imagination.